Yesterday in a session with my spiritual director, Elaine, I became aware of a dynamic in me that amounts to the equivalent of living outside myself. I wrote about this dynamic a bit on Still Forming today, comparing the experience to "what if?" clouds and pretzels.

When I pay attention to the "what if?" clouds, I'm living in the future -- the possibility of something that might happen -- and it affects my right-now reality because I start preparing and obsessing over how to prevent disasters that may never, in fact, happen.

And that's when the pretzel contortions come in. I'm not inhabiting my real self there, either -- I'm twisting and turning and curving into whatever shape I think other people might expect or want or demand.

This is me.

And now, here I sit, wondering if this all somehow connects to the body series I've been writing this year in some unexpected way.

I keep having this image of not living in the throes of the "what if?" clouds and not becoming a pretzel in response, and it's an image that takes the form of standing up straight and inhabiting my real self and body. This morning, that took the form of continuing to walk with Jesus on the beach in the way that we do these days, just being myself with him and agreeing to live openly and in risk for the things he is asking and calling me to do.

Standing up straight and inhabiting my real body.

Maybe the dynamic of clouds and pretzels in my life is connected to my lifelong existence of not caring for my body in any real, substantive way. If I choose to inhabit my real self, then maybe caring for my real body will come along as a greater priority and desire in my life, too.